Small aquatic organisms are used on a routine basis for education, entertainment, environmental testing, and as food for larger aquatic and semi-aquatic organisms, such as, marine animals and fish, freshwater animals and fish, brackish water animals and fish, freshwater and marine invertebrates, salamanders, lizards, turtles, newts, and frogs. Small aquatic organisms can be obtained by hatching resting eggs or cysts, reviving dormant and low activity forms of organisms, by propagating organisms in a culture solution, or combinations thereof.
Culture systems suitable for hatching, propagating, or growing aquatic organisms vary widely and are highly dependent upon the species and size of organism and the final anticipated use of the organism. The culture of aquatic organisms requires careful attention to chemical and physical parameters including the regulation of light, temperature, nutrients, wastes, buffers, salinities, and organism densities.
Standard practices involving the large scale culture of aquatic organisms often includes the use of transparent tanks or shallow pond systems, where light penetration can be maximized. Additionally, many culture systems involve aeration to control gases such as oxygen, ammonia, and carbon dioxide, to provide mixing, and to suspend non-soluble culture components including organisms.
Large scale culture of aquatic organisms in open and closed systems has been conducted for many years with varying degrees of success. Procedures and protocols are often complicated, time consuming, and require substantial experience to understand. Unfortunately, no level of experience guarantees the elimination of culture crashes of the primary organism or feed organisms. As a result, cultures require restarting and reviving. In many critical operations both backup and redundant systems must be established.
Live aquatic foods are ideally suited for pet and aquarium hobbyists which maintain marine, fresh, or brackish water systems on a small scale. Live foods promote health, reproductive vigor, and long lives in aquarium pets. When used correctly live foods also reduce aquarium and system maintenance. In the case of some wild-caught organisms, only live foods allow these organisms to be maintained in captivity. Additionally, fry and other immature organisms often feed only on live foods in the early stages of their development. Unfortunately, scaled down culture systems suitable for home use are, complicated, difficult to control, time consuming to set-up, and inconvenient for many hobbyists. As a result, foods of lower quality such as flake foods are used to the detriment of the pet or newly hatched offspring, and to the aquatic pet experience in general.
The culture of small aquatic organisms for educational purposes has been widely discussed and promoted in educational institutions at all levels. Unfortunately, the time consuming and inconvenient nature of such activities has reduced the use of such instructional systems at many institutions.
The instant invention discloses compact devices, materials, and methods for safely, simply, inexpensively, and efficiently, containing and culturing aquatic organisms for use in aquaculture, the pet and aquarium hobby, environmental sensing and toxicity testing, and for education and education-entertainment purposes. Batch, continuous, and semi-continuous culture methods are supported by devices of the invention.